US government rolling out largest DNSSEC deployment

When you file your taxes online, you want to be sure that the Web site you visit — www.irs.gov — is operated by the Internal Revenue Service and not a scam artist. By the end of next year, you can be confident that every U.S. government Web page is being served up by the appropriate agency.

That’s because the feds have launched the largest-ever rollout of a new authentication mechanism for the Internet’s DNS. All federal agencies are deploying DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) on the .gov top-level domain, and some expect that once that rollout is complete, banks and other businesses might be encouraged to follow suit for their sites.

The article goes on at some length into what the US government is doing, the issues involved and why it all matters. From a larger “Internet infrastructure” point-of-view, actions such as securing the DNS infrastructure will only help in securing services such as VoIP. There’s still a long way to go to getting DNSSEC widely available, but I applaud the US government for helping push efforts along.

FYI, the article references the obsolete RFC 2065 for DNSSEC. For those wishing the read the standard itself, DNSSEC is now defined in RFC’s 4033, 4034 and 4035 with a bit of an update in RFC 4470.